You really can’t blame Hollywood for wanting to get a little of what actor Mario Moreno was creating in his native Mexico.  Señor Moreno — aka Cantinflas — was the country’s premier comedian, a brash, impish, hilarious, mercurial force in their entertainment firmament.  Compared often to Charlie Chaplin and his Little Tramp character – for his vibrant physicality – and also to Groucho Marx — for his verbal talents — Cantinflas was a multi-talented sensation who began as a dancer and quickly managed to create his own unique niche in the hearts of audiences of all social classes.  His superb slapstick took him from successes on the stage to stardom in the cinema; he was often credited with securing the success of the entire Mexican film industry (alongside matinee idol Pedro Infante) during his career in the 1940s, especially.  Chaplin himself declared Moreno “the world’s greatest clown” — how could Hollywood not want a piece of that? 

Plenty of  American comics knew all about tummling – a Yiddish word for the kind of madcap comedy which was a speciality of entertainers like Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis who cut their teeth in the Catskills — but few knew about bullfighting, say, as did Cantinflas.  Out of his culture came one of his most famous bits, a comedic bullfight that put Moreno’s trademark Cantinflas character, with his little hat and his droopy pants held up by a precarious belt, into Mexico’s most flamboyant and traditional arena.  The Cantinflas name?  Either just a nonsense word made up to hide his show biz career from his parents, or else a contraction of a couple of phrases accusing someone of being drunk.  In the end, Cantinflas’ popularity and particular gifts led to the addition of several new words into the Spanish dictionary including cantinflear, meaning approximately to dazzle someone with nonsense conversation, based on Cantinflas’ favorite comedy tactic in his films.  Moreno’s character was a champion of the little people, a brave little bootblack, or waiter or military recruit or lab assistant, a genial trickster who delighted in bringing down pomposity and standing up for the downtrodden.  As he became richer and richer from his film successes, Moreno rose to his own position of power and influence, taking an active hand in political causes, purchasing agricultural concerns and airplanes, and hobnobbing with the very strata of Mexican society that he loved to bring down in his films.  Because the regular people loved Cantinflas so much, they seemed not to begrudge Mario Moreno the trappings of his enormous success, plus he maintained a generous philanthropic profile and was usually quick to come out in support of populist causes. 

By the time the 1950s came around, Cantinflas (he was born in 1911) had been a star in Mexican films since the late 1930s.  He was an executive at his own film production company, too;  Moreno was smart and business-savvy as well as funny.  He was bigger probably than any single star in the U.S. — we had so many of them on screen, and there were really only a handful of truly huge stars in Mexican cinema — and it made perfect sense to him when he allied himself with important American studio Columbia Pictures in 1946, putting their impressive resources behind his career.  (And thereby also creating a convoluted business arrangement that caused no end of trouble after his death).   Though they must have had some plans of introducing Moreno to audiences outside Mexico, Columbia merely continued milking the Cantinflas appeal in his traditional markets.  It took a unique show business rebel to divine the perfect breakout vehicle for Cantinflas.  How could theatrical and movie impresario Mike Todd find anybody better to lend a suitably international appeal and lustre to his upcoming  film production of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days?  Cast in the part of Phileas Fogg’s butler Passepartout — French in the novel — Cantinflas, still virtually unknown outside of Mexico moviehouses, took his place alongside star David Niven and breathed life into the mammoth undertaking.  Breathed life, and most importantly ensured box office success in the Spanish-speaking markets, that is.  Shirley MacLaine was along for the ride as the Hindu princess rescued from a sacrificial pyre, and Robert Newton appeared throughout as the detective dogging Fogg’s every move, but Cantinflas and Niven were the heart of the movie.  Their prickly though affectionate — in strictly stiff-upper-lip British-style, of course — relationship was the movie’s thru-line. 

Though the reputation of Around the World in 80 Days hasn’t exactly grown over the years — it’s frequently placed on the list of the least-deserving Best Picture Academy Award winners — it was a stunning achievement (at the very least in terms of scale and visual oomph) enlivened by beautiful scenery and glimpses of more stars than there are in heaven.  Mike Todd introduced (more or less)  the notion of all-star cameos, at least the kind where the stars don’t play themselves.  Who didn’t make an appearance in the movie?  Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton, Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich, Buster Keaton, John Gielguld, Peter Lorre, and dozens more international celebrities were sprinkled throughout Todd’s elaborate epic.  Shot on Todd’s proprietary widescreen process, the movie dazzled audiences, or maybe just tired them out, with a just about three-hour running time.  However, they all loved Cantinflas for his clowning and his charm, and he received a Golden Globe award for Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy for his work in the film.   At the very least, everybody seems to remember composer Victor Young’s title tune for the movie.

Moreno was also important to Mike Todd in another way, too.  He was an ally and confidante of the producer as Todd romantically pursued actress Elizabeth Taylor, who was ending her marriage to Michael Wilding but hadn’t quite fallen for Todd.  Production schedules allowed Todd opportunities to court the actress over various locales, with Moreno frequently privy to the plan at hand.  Eventually, after Todd had proposed to the actress after their whirlwind courtship, Moreno played host to the couple when they came to Mexico for their wedding.  He met Miss Taylor at the airport, squired them around the country, and paid for the elaborate fireworks display which concluded their wedding day festivities early in February of 1957.  (Sadly, their storybook  marriage came to an abrupt end when Todd was killed in a plane crash on March 22, 1958.)  Todd’s dreams for a version of Don Quixote, with Fernandel as Quixote and Cantinflas as Sancho Panza also died with him.  What this might have done for Moreno’s career…who can say?  (Also, Moreno’s verbal humor couldn’t be mined for U.S. audiences — imagine Groucho Marx trying to do his bits in Spanish.  The language barrier was something that even a multi-talented performer like Moreno couldn’t quite conquer.)

After the huge splash made by Around the World in 80 Days, Cantinflas might have imagined a continuing career in American cinema circles, but it wasn’t to be.  Attractive offers were not forthcoming, so he returned to his still-vibrant career in Mexico, though he was lured back to California by his studio Columbia several years later to make another stab at Hollywood.  Columbia had fashioned another all-star vehicle to re-introduce Cantinflas to American audiences, this time a stableboy-tries-to-do-good story called Pepe, directed by George Sidney, also starring Shirley Jones as an aspiring actress who befriends Pepe (Cantinflas) and Dan Dailey as a Hollywood producer.  Without Mike Todd, the hoopla and the historic proportions of Around the World in 80 Days, Pepe turned out to be an over-stuffed (over three hours long, later whittled down to a little over two and a half) musical comedy epic with Cantinflas wandering around Hollywood and Las Vegas in search of his pet horse who had been sold to a Hollywood bigwig.  Star cameos were jammed into every scene to add luster — Kim Novak, Bing Crosby, Bobby Darin, Maurice Chevalier, Debbie Reynolds, Sammy Davis Jr., Jimmy Durante, Ernie Kovacs, Judy Garland’s voice, Jack Lemmon, and many many more — and Cantinflas ran into them under various circumstances.  With television looming large as the biggest competition to audience’s time, and Hollywood thinking bigger was better to win the race, Pepe became one of the most notorious examples of the folly of that notion.  It was a flop, critically as well as financially, but at least the title tune “Pepe” became a popular hit for a while.   The movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards however, even if it didn’t enable Moreno to conquer Hollywood again.

After the disappointment of Pepe, Moreno returned to Mexico to resume his still vital career, and though by this time he was around fifty years old, he still continued to exhibit the comedic zest that audiences loved.  He continued to enjoy his exhalted position as Mexico’s Clown Emeritus, plus a privileged lifestyle which he always shared with his fans through his charity work and political involvement.  In the 1970s he lent his name and persona to an animated series, showing once again that his appeal for his Mexican fans was timeless and enduring.  He continued making films — over fifty during his career — until his last bigscreen appearance in 1981. In 1993 Mario Moreno died of lung cancer, leaving behind a unique legacy of entertainment, philanthropy, social commentary, and a bold nationalistic profile which is credited with influencing development of the later revolutionary Chicano theater style.  For a fascinating study of Cantinflas’ astounding influence on Mexico’s cultural scene, check out Jeffrey M. Pilcher’s book Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity and one by Moreno’s son.  There’s a terrific website (in Spanish) at Mario Morenas: Siempre Cantinflas, somebody from TCM Latin America hates Cantinflas, and there are oodles of Cantinflas videos on YouTube, and some whole movies if you search around the net and of course some available for sale.

It’s hard to adequately convey the charm and comic ability of Cantinflas through isolated film clips from his Spanish-language work, but I’ll include a few here.  Moreno’s background as a dancer made dancing scenes one of his trademarks, such as this Apache dance which is an interesting combination of silly and savage.  The Cantinflas character has an interesting blend of sexuality and slapstick, I’d say, more than most U.S. comics, save Groucho.  Not sure which movie this is from.

I think you’ll see Columbia Studios’ influence in this sequence from one of his 1951 films Si yo fuera diputado — it looks and sounds a lot like a Three Stooges short.

And here’s a clip in color from El Bolero de Raquel, a movie he made after Around the World in 80 Days, when he was back in Mexico.  More dancing, pretty cute.